Posts Made By: Roland Christen

This is a quite faint spiral with interesting structure. Taken while the Moon was up high and some high thin clouds. 7x600 sec exposure.

Would like to shoot this again when the skies are more transparent.

Rolando

NGC 300 is part of the Sculptor group of galaxies. Taken with the AP 305F8 Mak-Cass astrograph at our remote site at Las Campanas Chile. This is a small cropped version. The full frame contains several dozen tiny galaxies, which I will post later.

Rolando

Cute little galaxies, which also include NGC7769, 7770 and a number of small faint guys.

Taken under relatively poor conditions, light pollution and poor seeing. (always some excuse, no?)

Rolando

Image taken at our remote observatory in Chile. Data taken by Howard Hedlund at Astro-Physics,processed by Dave Jurasevich. 12" F8 astrograph, 16803 FLI CCD camera.

http://www.starimager.com/Image%20Gallery%20Pages/Galaxies/NGC%20253_2400_LCO%20AP12MC.html

Rolando

This image was shot recently from our remote observatory in Chile with the 12" F8 astrograph. Limited amount of color data, only 3 x 15 minute RGB exposures and 12 x 20 minute Luminance.

We have about 3 times more data that we haven't processed yet, this is just a quick look to see what the image will look like.

Rolando

Another southern hemisphere object we will start imaging next week. This shot is just a single 10 minute exposure for framing this area.

Rolando

This probably belongs in the equipment message, but since we are talking about the 12", I posted it here. The picture shows the result of butterfingers on my part, while coating the second 12" astrograph mirror. Everything was perfect, I managed a great figure on the mirror, then placed it in the coating chamber for the aluminizing. When the coating was done, I started to pull it out and ooops, it slipped out of my hand.

Fortunately the glass is quartz, which is quite tough (optical glass would have shattered), so I only had to grind off about 2 mm, repolish it, and refigure. Second time around I managed a very nice coating without the ooops.

Rolando

If you squint enough, it sure looks like the jolly old elf on his sleigh.

Rolando

These are some of the first images that I have processed from my recent trip to several Chile observatories. I spent time at Cerro Tololo and Las Campanas doing service work on a number of remote observatories, including mounts and scopes from 12" to 24" apertures.

I also spent 6 days at Daniel Verchatse's Hacienda Los Andes, where he has set up a number of imaging scopes for visitors to use. These include a 175EDF refractor, a 14" RC Optical astrograph, a 20" Tec astrograph and a number of visual scopes from 6" to 12" aperture. These scopes are in roll-off roof and clamshell domes, and come complete with cameras, computers and software, ready to image. All you need bring is a thumb drive to take home the data. And I did bring many gigabytes home with me.

These first images were taken with the 175EDF (the color image) and the 20" Tec astrograph (the black&white one). While the 175EDF refractor provided a fine shot of a small galaxy, it took a large number of individual exposures to show all the features of this object (NGC1097). All in all there were 24 x 600 seconds of L and 10 x 600 seconds of RGB binned 2x2 in the refractor image. The 20" Tec, on the other hand slammed so much light down in a short time that it recorded more faint detail in only 4 x 600 second exposures. Some of that has to do with the camera which had 9 micron pixels versus the 7.4 micron used on the refractor. However, the main reason is that the 20" gathers some 8 times the light that the 175 does in the same amount of time. So for small galaxies, the large aperture is the way to go. For wide field deep sky, the smaller refractor is king (will post a cool wide field later).

One comment about the TEC astrograph. I worked with a number of large scopes from various manufacturers from 16" to 24" aperture. While impressive in size, they did not impress me in their mechanical and optical performance. The TEC in my opinion was the cleanest and nicest design that I had the pleasure to use. The images were crisp even in not-so-great seeing at times, and produced outstanding resolution when the seeing really got good. It was a pleasure to use, but unfortunately Yuri at TEC has decided to not make any more of them. And that is really a shame.

Rolando

One of the more interesting areas of the southern winter Milky Way is the region of the Carina nebula. It is a very bright and very impressive nebula. Nearby there is also a fainter star forming region of intense nebulosity, NGC 3324. In the center is the Gabriela Mistral nebula, so named for a famous Nobel Prize winning Chilean poet.

While the Carina nebula is easily seen with the unaided eye, the Gabriela Mistral is many times fainter and I could not see it even with binoculars.

This first image is taken in H-alpha, 30 x 600 seconds exposure with the 175EDF refractor. It shows the entire region including the outermost parts of the carina region on the right and the beautiful star cluster at bottom left.

Rolando